It’s the end of 2007, so we can take stock on what may be the most significant IT event this year; the launch of Vista. Yes, I know, 2007 saw the release of OS X Leopard and Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon too. This suggests that if you didn’t name your OS release after African fauna, it was destined to go badly. The leopard and gutsy gibbon releases did well, but the Vista release was clearly a disaster for Microsoft, for many reasons. Here’s ten of them:

1. Vista was already riding for a fall. Vista just got later and later, eventually arriving more than 5 years after XP and after a time rumors kept emerging about what was being left out. Eventually it emerged that the much anticipated WinFS file system never made the cut. From that point on most people began to believe that Longhorn would never be the “big makeover/near rewrite” that had been promised. Microsoft’s handling of the PR and marketing around Vista was amateurish, to say the least. In a number of areas Vista is a significant improvement over XP, especially in the areas of GUI look and feel, media and network operations (and it includes Version 3 of .NET). However, very few column inches appeared praising any of this. It was all about the downside.

2. The multiple Vista versions and price. Microsoft decided to release 5 versions; Home Basic, Home Premium, Vista Business, Vista Enterprise, Vista Ultimate (in both 32 and 64 bt incarnations). What were they smoking? The real problem was with Vista Home Basic, which is such a hobbled version (no Aero, only one CPU supported, no media, no DVDwriter, no web server, etc.) that only those with half a brain are going to buy it. (Premium costs a mere $40 more, at $239). If you compare any Vista version with OS X Leopard ($129) on a simple feature basis, Leopard looks like exceptional value. Microsoft compounded the versions problem by issuing a “Vista Capable” sticker for PCs, which confused some consumers into believing (quite wrongly) that PCs with this label could run any copy of Vista. Microsoft is now being sued for “deceptive practices” over this.

3. The hardware compatibility issue. For reasons that are still quite unclear, many devices simply were not “Vista Capable” when Vista first appeared. It has taken an unusually long time for this to settle down. By November most devices had appropriate drivers. However, many consumers were completely unimpressed with this. Indeed it was probably this that provoked the “back to XP” trend that emerged in the summer.

4. The software compatibility issue. As for hardware, so for software. There has been a far greater number of software compatibility problems than are usual for a new version of Windows. This is (unsurprisingly) quite common with games, but there has also been some problems with software from the likes of Symantec and Adobe.

5. The security malaise. Microsoft finally did something meaningful about Windows security. Unfortunately it did it badly. The key design point for security features is that they should, as far as possible, be unintrusive. Vista’s User Account Control (UAC) provides the software authentication capability that had been so badly lacking from Windows, but it proves to be very intrusive and annoying in use. Evidence suggests that some home users are turning it off. When UAC is turned off, the security of Vista is as bad as it ever was for XP.

6. Microsoft DRM. Microsoft has invested very heavily over the years in DRM and has effective DRM technology, which it introduced with Vista. The problem is that consumers don’t want DRM. To be fair this is a problem that the music publishers and film companies have also failed to grasp properly. DRM may be hated by the information-longs-to-be-free brigade, but it’s also resented by the average consumer, because it simply gets in the way. Microsoft has pandered to Hollywood with DRM and right now, because the new high definition DVDs are not circulating much, it hasn’t drawn too much attention. But when they do, it will. Vista DRM has been described as “a bomb waiting to go off”. Peter Gutmann, a computer scientist from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, has released a whitepaper that raises concerns about the security mechanisms used in Vista DRM. (see A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection).

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